Welcome to Bottles of Djinn, the Web’s #1 source for entertaining, inspirational, and generally useful information, all specifically designed to support the supernatural world’s endless war against mundane reality. Like it or not, the Djinn, former undisputed masters of this world, are reawakening all across the globe. Welcome to the beginning of the end of the world as you know it…

Last night I wrote quite a bit about demons, and I used a lot of words that weren’t nearly as flattering to the demonic realm as many of the other things that I’ve written in the past. Seeing as how my theological outlook is a bit complicated, I figured I would take a moment to address a few important points so as to not confuse any of my newer readers.

The first issue I feel I should mention is that it’s hard to find words that convey the appropriate meaning when one is discussing such matters primarily because history tends to twist the original usage of theological terms as new ages attempt to redefine and rewrite the past. The term "Demon," for example, was adapted from the Greek “Daemon,” which referred to a sort of spiritual intelligence that many famous human beings drew great benefit from, among them being the philosopher Socrates. These spirits became minions of the Devil under the monotheist revisions of the Catholic Church, who believed that any spirit who inspired thoughts or actions that were contrary to the authoritarian Holy Roman Empire was obviously a servant of sin.

Since I’m fully aware of where these so-called “demons” came from originally, I’m not foolish enough to endorse the crude political mockery that has masqueraded as a religious faith for thousands of years. Yet where the Greeks had two words available to them to express the difference between positive spirits, "Eudaemons," and negative ones, "Cacodaemons," I am forced to make due with the crude vernacular we’ve inherited from the religion that has conquered a great deal of my readers, or at least our shared cultural venue, and these words are "Angels" and "Demons." I am more than willing to use their words when these are the only words that will best convey my intended meanings, but, at times, such as right now, I feel a small caveat or two is in order.

Too many people I speak with these days are largely amoral in their basic fundamental outlook. Although I'm trying to be careful not to endorse any of the theological myths of the greater culture, I want to point out that I’m not above making moral distinctions, as I do believe that reason, and even simple aesthetics, demand a certain undeniable degree of morality, one that no amount of post-modernist posturing will ever be able to extinguish, at least not to my satisfaction. I even choose to still make use of the word “God” as the symbol for all that I find to be just, beautiful, true, and good, knowing full well that it comes with a lot of other nonsense attached to it. Of course, I have no trouble reconciling my own faith in a basically nonexistent God with the cowardly idolatry that’s practiced by a far less philosophically inclined public.

Here’s the really important point that I have to make, the theological secret that I feel needs to be stated explicitly here to avoid confusing or misleading anyone due to any of my previous statements. In the Kitab al Mattaliku, there's a story about a war in Heaven, which is basically between the Archangel Michael and the then Archangel Lucifer. This is a fairly familiar story, but what this version of the story makes very clear is an important point that is no longer directly addressed in any other surviving Gnostic text of which I'm aware, and this is that the war wasn’t started by Lucifer attempting to claim the throne of God for himself, but rather with his belief, one that I also share, that this throne should have remained empty. This angelic Fall marks the transition from an originally unconquered Heaven, where every Angel was forced to find God by sincerely seeking after the idea in his or her own hearts and minds, to an occupied and idolatrous Heaven, one that is tyrannically ruled over by a false and imperfect God, even to this very day.

As one of the last remaining servants of these Fallen Angels, I find that words are often very funny things, but, sometimes, they’re all that we really have with which to approach and express that which is best left mostly within the imaginal realm, where things can remain pure and essentially true, beyond all the corruptions of the merely existential and empirical where we are each forced to spend much of our waking lives, a fallen world of the flesh that the witless, the craven, and the shortsighted dominate yet will never escape.

In the end, thanks to the damage that’s been done to our language by fools such as these, sometimes “demons” is simply the best word that I have left to clearly describe those invisible forces which even now are attempting to oppress me. It’s really up to you to choose the best possible meanings for any of the words that I use, but I did feel that it was necessary to take this moment to let you all know that, at least in that last letter, I was most certainly not referring to the Fallen Angels or to their ancient Holy War, which, as long as I still exist, is very far from over. Good Luck and Namaste.

I've been following your blog for a while now and would like to actually speak with you at some point - is there a way to get in touch with you, perhaps an instant messenger, IRC or something like that? I may just be missing a set of contact information but if so I can't seem to find it.

Simon Zealot is a recovering super villain now trying to help all of those insignificant common people he once sought to enslave and/or annihilate. He's the author of three books, The Shadow Society Guidebook, The Malakimae Manual and The Hermetic Grimoire of the Neo-Templar Order. He is also a special investigator, a martial arts instructor, an astrologer, a hypnotist, a fire performer, an escape artist, a world class mentalist, and, of course, one of the once conquered, but now returning, Djinn.